Thanksgiving Thoughts

I have become frustrated; yes, that’s the best way to begin my thoughts on thankfulness. It is exasperating to continually feel the weightiness of how disinclined I am to pursue life with the joy and thanksgiving I ought.  I just spent the last 48 hours of Thanksgiving preparations and celebrations cooking, baking, talking, laughing, praying, eating, and so much more; but, I look back and see that those hours have ingested a great deal of pain and suffering as well. It is so easy to look at holidays with a foggy notion of perfection and falsified joy-- to believe that if you’re lucky enough to look in on your family and see a scene that belongs in one of those old snow globes, you’ve simply achieved the stamp of approval for holiday perfection. And yet, how often I have overlooked the moments for which I am called to repent, even in the middle of living a “picture-perfect life.” If I think about this day in light of the blessing of eternity a number of formidable things come to mind. 

First, is the daunting thought that while salvation provided by Jesus Christ lasts throughout all eternity, I am by no means prepared for such bliss. I am far too conceded to worship God as his righteousness demands. I am too naive of my own faults to enjoy the grace of God in all its splendor. I would love to leave this world behind, abandon the tension it provides my heart and soul, have silenced the deafening cry of sin and all its implications; but God is gracious as he continues to provide me time to walk beside him and be in awe of his great works here on this earth. May I evermore “...do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with [my] God” (Micah 6:8). 

In direct correspondence with that thought, is the awe-inspiring idea that, not only does God graciously allow us to “work out [our] salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12) on this earth, but He has also allowed us to call heaven our home in which we may one day live. We have a home that does not have to forbid acts of folly, it foregoes them all together. We have a home that lacks nothing because it holds within it the God of the universe. We have a home that refuses to possess any haunting hallways, lurking corridors, or rooms filled with sour evocative notions. It indelibly stands as the home where our sin is not known or remembered, but our salvation, our redemption is fully realized. What a blessed thing! And what a wretched thought that I cannot, and often choose not, to dwell on the beauty of this with the intensity and wonderment it demands. 

There is one last and final hope in this train of thought, however, and it lies in this: that though I will never appreciate the costliness of God’s grace as I ought, and even though Jared’s cancer continues to wretch out my soul with all its might as the acuteness of my sin is brought before me, “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Christ is the perfect sacrifice by which we are saved. I am commanded to “work out” my salvation-- to live in awe and wonder and in light of the reality of it-- but never to provide such a magnificent thing as it for myself. Christ has accomplished what is not probably for the a sinner such as I. And so I rejoice again with the wise dying words of John Newton (author of the hymn Amazing Grace), “My memory is nearly gone; but I remember two things; That I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Savior.”